Americans are obsessed with fad diets. Stroll down the health section at your local bookstore and you are likely to be bombarded with books like Eat Right 4 Your Type: The Blood Type Diet and Dr. Kushner’s Personality Type Diet.
Other wacky fad diets include the all-peanut butter diet, the breathing diet, the cabbage soup diet and the raw-food only diet. But the current trend has held on longer than most: the low-carbohydrate diet.
Dr. Barbara Millen, professor of nutrition at the Division of Graduate Medical Sciences at BU, explained the low-carb lure.
“The impression is that if people enjoy animal protein and animal fat products, which are certainly allowed on these diets, then they can eat as much as they want and still lose weight,” she said.
Other fad diets are more or less single-food categories, unlike the Atkins or the South Beach diets, which eliminate or reduce the entire carbohydrate category. Low-carb followers still enjoy a broad selection of dairy and animal products and fruits and vegetables.
Exercise and portion control are difficult for a society that enjoys mass transportation and numerous food choices everywhere it turns. Making significant lifestyle changes that run counter to the ease and speed of fast food and portable meals is difficult.
“Most people are not currently exercising or eating in a way that approaches a healthy guideline,” said Millen. “We need to make a real shift in such sedentary and non-nutritional behavior, and adopt those practices long term.”
But if you don’t have time to work out on Sunday, why not grab a low-carb breakfast bar on the way to class Monday morning? And if the first week of the semester is already full, many students might decide to just take a break from exercise and eliminate carbs for the week.
Low-carb ketchup may seem silly, but Americans create the need for such things, according to Scott Swain, assistant professor of marketing in the School of Management.
“Marketers are mirrors of what we’re going for,” he said. “We’ve gotten so busy that we don’t have time for a healthy plan, and if a book comes out that says eat lobster and meat, just not potatoes – we’ll believe it.”
The fad pulls businesses into it, such as the beer industry, which took a huge hit before rolling out low-carb versions of its drinks.
“A lot of businesses were pulled into this kicking and screaming,” Swain said. “If you take a big enough hit, you’re going to join.”
But just how low-carb can you go? Not much further, according to a study by InsightExpress, an online research firm.
The survey included a random sample of 500 people recruited over the internet during a 48-hour period in early July. Researchers found that 40 percent of consumers think a food’s total calorie content is important, while 30 percent consider a food’s total carbohydrate content. Four out of five Americans have never been on a low-carb diet, and half of Americans who have tried low-carb diets have given them up.
Caitlin Coen, a College of Arts and Sciences senior, tried restricting herself to eggs in the morning, salad in the afternoon and fish in the evening for two weeks before she found out that low-carb is not a lifestyle.
“One day I felt lightheaded, and I was losing energy and concentration,” she confessed.
Coen maintained her workout regiment and integrated carbohydrates back into her diet. Now, instead of white bread, she ate wheat; instead of chips, crunched on Wheat Thins.
Although she quit her diet, Coen didn’t “leave it unsuccessfully. I learned how to portion control and eat carbs in a nutritious way.”
Ross Schwartz, also a CAS senior, had a similar experience.
“It made me cranky because I was constantly thinking about carbs and couldn’t have them,” he said.
For Schwartz, the diet changed his body composition but not his weight. “I felt like it didn’t really make a difference,” he said.
And it’s a good thing people are finding out they don’t work, in Millen’s opinion.
“Since the weight loss is coming not from fat, but from body water, people’s weight gain will be substantial and fairly immediate when they go back to a more normal diet,” she explained. “There is this negative reaction and it becomes a motivational problem.”
Judith Wurtman, visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Clinical Research Center, has explored the role of carbohydrates in the brain and its negative impact.
Women with premenstrual syndrome sometimes overeat carbs and gain weight, Wurtman told MIT’s news office. She speculated that this overeating increases brain serotonin, which diminishes feelings of depression and anger.
“People need to eat carbohydrates [because of] the brain’s need to synthesize serotonin due to stress,” she told MIT.
Another long-term concern with low-carb diets is the relatively high protein load and the effect this has on the kidneys. The New England Journal of Medicine published a report comparing low-carb diets with low-fat diets in September 2003.
The best way to lose weight and stay healthy, according to Millen and many others, is a combination of diet and exercise.
“It’s the only successful way to [get healthy].”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
